Over the next three weeks, I invite you to enjoy some seasonal reading fun with four new short stories I’ve written for Halloween. I took a brief hiatus from working on a revision of ROOM 100 to put these together, all of them prompted by my partner, who for reasons I don’t understand, loves to be terrified during nighttime car trips. (Erin, these are for you.)

Here is the first. It’s about two sisters who spend the night in a haunted Mojave Desert hotel. Stay tuned for the next later this week.

As a gay writer unofficially married to a member of the U.S. military, I’ve been preoccupied with the relationship of art, war, and technology for almost nine months. The idea for my next novel resonates with the past writing I have done about the geopolitics of the Middle East, but is something totally new and differently interesting to me.

My plan for the novel is moving toward literary cyberpunk, takes place in New Orleans, could appeal to YA readers, and may possibly work as a series. I’ll say more when I’m done with a solid draft, likely late this year or early 2013. For now, the premise beneath my thought experiment is Art and war are complementary. Technology strives to make both unnecessary.